Saturday, 31 October 2015

Richard Dawkins and some other evolutionists tend to claim that no reputable scientist doubts evolution. However, Darwinists often define evolution in anything but a precise manner.

If one defines it as gradual development from a common ancestor (goo-to-you, via the zoo), then a very different picture appears:

“The theory of evolution is the great white elephant of contemporary thought. It is large, almost entirely useless, and the object of superstitious awe,” as mathematician David Berlinski famously put it.

There are several lists of scientists who doubt evolution. The best-known one is Discovey Institute’s Scientific Dissent from Darwinism with over 800 names. In addition, the Creation Research Society has over 600 members and Dr. Jerry Bergman has “compiled a list of 3,000 ‘Darwin Skeptics,’ including about a dozen Nobel Prize winners.”

Dr. Bergman has another list of 1,000 scientists who do not want to go public with their dissent. He says that he “could easily complete a list of over 10,000 names,” if he had the time and resources to do so.

Source:

Cloud, David. 2015. How Many Scientists Reject Darwinian Evolution? Way of Life Literature (25 March).

Thursday, 29 October 2015

Belief in a billions-of-years-old solar system is becoming increasingly difficult due to some recent discoveries.

The latest scoop came from oxygen found in Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. According to New Scientist:

“Oxygen is a volatile chemical that shouldn’t stick around for long in space, and the team couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t coming from the spacecraft itself. But after seven months of observing, they were confident that the oxygen had been buried in the comet since its birth about 4.5 billion years ago.”

It is a huge problem for a worldview not based on Genesis. As yet, no one has figured out a plausible explanation.

And we should not forget that there are many other signs of youth on planets, moons, dwarf planets and even asteroids.

Wednesday, 28 October 2015

In 2011 a paper published in the journal Nature Communications on two harvestmen fossils uses expressions like “surprisingly modern”, “remarkable similarities”, “extensive morphological stasis” and "fully modern body plans", suggesting that the long-legged creatures have hardly changed at all in “305 million years.”

The authors begin with some background information:

“Harvestmen, the third most-diverse arachnid order, are an ancient group found on all continental landmasses, except Antarctica. However, a terrestrial mode of life and leathery, poorly mineralized exoskeleton makes preservation unlikely, and their fossil record is limited. The few Palaeozoic species discovered to date appear surprisingly modern, but are too poorly preserved to allow unequivocal taxonomic placement.”

Then they highlight the importance of their discovery:

“Here, we use high-resolution X-ray micro-tomography to describe two new harvestmen from the Carboniferous (~305 Myr) of France. The resulting computer models allow the first phylogenetic analysis of any Palaeozoic Opiliones, explicitly resolving both specimens as members of different extant lineages, and providing corroboration for molecular estimates of an early Palaeozoic radiation within the order. Furthermore, remarkable similarities between these fossils and extant harvestmen implies extensive morphological stasis in the order. Compared with other arachnids—and terrestrial arthropods generally—harvestmen are amongst the first groups to evolve fully modern body plans.”

Charles Darwin could hardly have anticipated how rapidly the list of living fossils would evolve 150 years after The Origin of Species.

The fossil record is often characterised by stasis, or lack of change – the opposite of what evolutionists would expect.

Monday, 26 October 2015

It’s a tiny lizard, barely 20 centimetres (8 inches) long, but it can glide 8 metres (26 feet). This colourful creature looks like a dragon, so it is no surprise that it’s called Draco volans, or flying dragon.

A fact sheet on the creature explains how it glides:

“The flying dragon has 6 to 7 pairs of ribs which are much longer than others. The skin between the ribs forms a large membrane called the patagium. This membrane can be folded just like a fan. When the lizard glides, it spreads out its ribs foward, forming a gliding surface.”

It’s not the only amazing glider.

The lizard displays the hallmarks of design. Researchers have a hard time explaining why and how these tiny dragons or other creatures took to the air, but here’s one attempt from the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology:

“The evolution of gliding can be cast as a multistep process initiated with an aerial righting reflex, and then followed by behavioral adaptations such that the falling lizard assumes a characteristic splayed posture with the body and tail oriented in the horizontal plane while falling. This allows the lizard to maximize drag and thus to parachute to the ground at a reduced velocity relative to that of a tumbling lizard (Oliver 1951).”

Like all animals, the Draco volans is amazingly well designed to do what it does.

Sources:

McGuire, Jimmy A. and Robert Dudley. 2011. The Biology of Gliding in Flying Lizards (Genus Draco) and their Fossil and Extant Analogs. Integrative and Comparative Biology, July 2011, 1–8.

It’s known as a mountain monkey after its Spanish name monito del monte, but it is a marsupial. Evolutionists believe that it is a living fossil,

“the only surviving member of an otherwise extinct lineage dating back more than 40 million years [sic]. Only slightly larger than a mouse, this little marsupial is an excellent climber. The base of the prehensile – or grasping – tail is capable of storing fat, which enables the animals to hibernate during the winter when food is scarce.”

All living fossils are fully functional, highly specified creatures that defy Darwinian storytelling.

Thursday, 22 October 2015

Zoologists tend to describe the chevrotain as a very primitive creature as some of its features resemble those of a pig.

A paper published in the journal Zoologica Scripta suggests:

“Tragulids are traditionally considered as the most primitive living ruminants (e.g. Janis 1984), and they still survive as tropical relicts: the water chevrotains (Hyemoschus) of Africa and the mouse deer or Asiatic chevrotain (Tragulus) of south-east Asia. They are characterized by their skeletal and dental features which are primitive within ruminants, and their general shape, digestive system and ethology which are reminiscent to those of pigs (Dubost 1965).”

The chevrotain has hardly changed in “34 million years”. In this context, describing a feature as primitive is a way of saying that there’s been no evolution in this cute little animal.

The enormous number of living fossils should be an embarrassment to a theory (Darwinian evolution) that is often defined as change over time.

Other living fossils include the ant Martialis heureka, pangolin, okapi, tarsier, red panda, sponges, nautilus. koala and starfish, for instance.

Tuesday, 20 October 2015

Hot beginnings? Image courtesy of the National Park Service, public domain.

Joel Kontinen

Many evolutionists assume that our planet’s early days were so hot that they call the period the Hadean Era after a place known as Hades.

New research challenges this assumption. Reporting on a recent paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), New Scientist says:

“But Elizabeth Bell and Mark Harrison at the University of California, Los Angeles, and their colleagues think life might have existed in the Hadean after all.

They analysed more than 10,000 zircon crystals smaller than a millimetre in length that date from the Archaean and Hadean. In one Hadean crystal they found tiny flecks, or inclusions, of graphite, which must have been incorporated into the zircon crystal when it formed some 4.1 billion years ago.”

This would leave very little time for a naturalistic origin of life, even though the date is accompanied by some naturalistic inflation that cannot be corroborated.

Previous studies suggested that Earth probably had water from the very beginning.

Naturalistic explanations fail to account for the source of the Earth’s water.

Fine-tuning is a much more plausible explanation than a lucky accident. Moreover, the naturalistic scenario includes other weird puzzles, such as snowball earth, that have never been solved.

The most plausible explanation for our origins is given in the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created.”

Source:

Colin Barras, Colin Barras. 2015. Life may have begun 300 million years earlier than we thought. New Scientist. (19 October).

Monday, 19 October 2015

We might think that guitarfish had a huge problem. A brief article in Science says:

“Like sharks, the giant guitarfish doesn’t have eyelids that close all the way, so it can’t blink. That might guarantee a win in a staring contest, but it does pose problems for eye protection in the sandy, tropical waters where the creature lives.”

But that is by no means the end of the story:

“So when thrashing prey kick sand or bits of coral its way, the guitarfish protects itself with an eye-catching method: retracting its eyes almost completely into its head, leaving a craterlike depression. Now, new research shows that guitarfish can thank a specialized eye muscle for that ability. Using high-speed video, researchers found a guitarfish could sink its eye nearly 40 mm. That’s almost as much as the diameter of the eyeball itself and likely more than any other vertebrate, the researchers reported online before print in Zoology.”

The animal kingdom abounds with sophisticated solutions, for instance in the moth’s eyes, cormorants, the seahorse’s tail, mantis shrimp and the octopus, to name just a few.

These wonders suggest they were designed. And design suggests an All-Wise Designer, whom we call God, and who speaks to us in the Bible.

Sunday, 18 October 2015

When Edward O. Wilson saw the ant, he thought it looked so strange it could have been from Mars. The name, Martialis heureka (‘From Mars! Wow!’) started as a joke, but that is how museums and biology textbooks now know the pale ant that was found in Brazil in 2000.

It does not have compound eyes, and researchers tend to think that it hasn’t changed much in over “100 million years.”

Like other living fossils, this little ant reminds us that stasis or the lack of evolutionary change is very common in the animal kingdom.

In other words, it challenges evolutionary dogma.

Source:

Chang, Kenneth. 2008. Scientists Find One Specimen of Bizarre Primitive Ant. The New York Times (17 September).

Saturday, 17 October 2015

An illustration of a flea in Hooke’s book Micrographia. Image courtesy of the National Library of Wales, public domain.

Joel Kontinen

In 1655 Robert Hooke’s book Micrographia made history. For the first time people could see what parasites, plants and small insects looked like.

Robert Hooke (1635 –1703) was one of the most important pioneers of modern science. A member of the Royal Society, he was a polymath who has been likened to Leonardo da Vinci.

A ScienceShot article says,

“Robert Hooke was one of history’s most important scientists, coining the word ’cell’ and making profound contributions to timekeeping, astronomy, physics, and microscopy. He also argued, controversially in Micrographia, that fossils were the mineralized remains of ancient living organisms. We’ve learned a lot in the intervening centuries, but Hooke’s illustrations still inspire us to look closer.”

What the brief article in Science does not say is that Hooke gave glory to God. He was humble enough to acknowledge that seeing life through a microscope indicated that compared to us, the Maker of all living beings is really awesome:

““The more we magnify the object, the more excellencies and mysteries do appear; And the more we discover the imperfections of our senses, and the Omnipotency and Infinite perfections of the great Creator.”

Like many other pioneers of modern science, for instance, Sir Isaac Newton and Louis Pasteur, Hooke believed in God, who is introduced to us in the Book of Genesis.

Sources:

Harrison, Peter. 2001. The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rogers, Nala. 2015. Hooke opened up the world of the unseen 350 years ago. ScienceShot (16 October).

Thursday, 15 October 2015

Pangolins are intriguing creatures that have hardly changed at all in “45 million years.” According to the University of Berkeley – California website:

“An essentially modern-looking fossil pangolin, Eomanis, has been found in the Eocene of Germany, and another fossil pangolin has been found in the lower Oligocene of North America.”

The ever growing list of living fossils should be an embarrassment for Darwinian evolution, a theory that is supposed to be characterised by change over time from humble beginnings to ever increasing sophistication.

In very many cases, the data do not support this view at all.

(You can read more about living fossils here, here, here, here, here and here.)

Wednesday, 14 October 2015

Charles Darwin and other evolutionists have made up fact-free stories about the assumed evolution of the giraffe’s long neck. What they have failed to notice, however, is that some animals, such as zebras and gazelles, tend to cope well on the savannah with their much shorter necks.

While the okapi (Okapia johnstoni) prefers to live in the rainforest, it is related to the giraffe. 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) tall at the shoulder, it has remained much smaller than its cousin and mostly unchanged for some “18 million years” and is thus assumed to be a living fossil.

Evolution is often defined as change over time, especially when its advocates want to advertise it as a viable theory, but in practice stasis or lack of change in often the norm, for instance in the red panda, nautilus, koala, or Gingko tree, to name only a few of the tens of living fossils found all over the world.

Monday, 12 October 2015

Evolution should be characterised by change over time. However, in numerous cases the very opposite – that is, nothing – happens. Animals stay more or less like their great-great-great-ancestors.

Like other living fossils, tarsiers have resisted change for aeons.

Evolutionists tend to believe that tarsiers “belong to a relict lineage of primates that gave rise to monkeys and apes about 60 million years ago.” However, they will admit that they are living fossils that have hardly changed in “45 million years.”

Tarsiers are anything but primitive; they communicate using ultrasound.

And the presence of tarsiers in Asia has prompted evolutionists to speculate that these tiny furry creatures were excellent mariners, crossing the ocean from Africa.

Contrary to the claims of Darwinists like Richard Dawkins, our world does not look like it was produced by a blind watchmaker. We see order and great beauty all around us.

Information, mathematics and beauty come together in the Fibonacci series. Discovered by a 13th century Italian mathematician, the series is not too complicated, as it involves adding together two integers, either beginning with 0 or 1, to produce a new number.

Each new number is the sum of the previous two numbers, for instance

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144., or

Fn = F n-1 + F n-2.

We can find this sequence practically everywhere in nature, from the very small to the huge. We tend to see beauty in tiny seeds, shells, the petals of a flower and compound eyes, and even in the arms of spiral galaxies. (See examples here, here and here.)

We tend to associate the Fibonacci series with beauty. Indeed, if we divide any number in the series by the previous number, we’ll get a result that is not far from 1.618, which happens to be the golden ratio that is used in the arts and in architecture.

This kind of beauty does not come about by chance. In requires design – and intelligence.

It seems that our Creator was and is the greatest mathematician and artist of all times.

A wholphin named Keikaimalu made headlines in 1985 when it was born in Sea Life Park in Hawaii. The sea creature’s parents were a false killer whale and a bottlenose dolphin. The wholphin later gave birth to a second-generation female wholphin called Kawili Kai.

These two wholphins show that the Genesis After Is Kind principle describes animal life reliably.

Species are man-made distinctions and they differ from the original kinds. Hybrids such as ligers, zonkeys, geeps and grolars also indicate that when it comes genetics, Moses is more up-to-date than Darwin.

Thursday, 8 October 2015

Several studies have shown that birds and dinosaurs lived at the same time. A recent headline in ScienceDaily included the phrase “birds flew over the heads of dinosaurs.”

And not just any kind of birds, but ones that flew like modern birds.

Reporting on research published in the journal Scientific Reports, ScienceDaily states:

“A new discovery documents the intricate arrangement of the muscles and ligaments that controlled the main feathers of the wing of an ancient bird, supporting the notion that at least some of the most ancient birds performed aerodynamic feats in a fashion similar to those of many living birds.”

The researchers assume that the ”exceptionally preserved wing” that they studied belonged to a bird that lived “125 million years ago” or roughly 25 million years after the “earliest” bird Archaeopteryx.

They were able to study the bird’s “complex network of muscles,” which indicates that it was still soft and partly unfossilised.

It seems that soft tissue is becoming a nightmare for believers in millions of years.

Tuesday, 6 October 2015

In July, scientists were saying that there’s probably no life on Mars. They were not sure whether the red planet was wet or dry.

But now the story has changed dramatically. A brief report in TIME’s newsletter suggests:

“Mars may be the solar system’s most tragic planet. It once had a dense atmosphere; it once fairly sloshed with water; just one of its oceans may have covered two-thirds of its northern hemisphere.”

Sloshed with water? That is an interpretation unsubstantiated by the evidence. This doesn’t seem to prevent speculations, however:

“With seasons very much like Earth’s, it could have been home to who knows what kinds of life. But Mars suffered an apocalypse that’s never quite been explained; perhaps meteorite bombardments blasted its atmosphere into space, and the planet’s weak gravity frittered away the rest. The result either way is the cold, dead, dry world we see today. Except now, it seems, it’s not so dry—and perhaps not so dead.”

One of the things these speculations often ignore is that in order to sustain life, a planet needs more than just water. Plate tectonics and a big moon are also needed. Venus is Earth’s sister planet, and yet no one would expect to find life there.

Unlike Mars or Venus, Earth seems to be unique, fine tuned for life.

In other words, God created this planet to be habitable.

Source:

Kluger, Jeffrey. 2015. What the Modern Presence of Water on Mars Means. TIME newsletter (28 September).

Some dinosaurs preferred to live in the cold Arctic, or at least some researchers think that they did. A recent press release posted on ScienceDaily states:

“Scientists have uncovered a new species of duck-billed dinosaur, a 30-footlong herbivore that endured months of winter darkness and probably experienced snow. The skeletal remains of the dinosaurs were found in a remote part of Alaska. These dinosaurs were the northernmost dinosaurs known to have ever lived.”

Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, as the dinosaur is now known, challenges much that researches thought they knew about dinos. While the climate within the Arctic Circle was probably much warmer than it is today, the winters were dark and the average temperature round 6 degrees Celsius (43 degrees Fahrenheit).

The fossils are assumed to be 69 million years old.

According to a much more logical scenario, the dinosaurs met their end in the global flood of Noah’s day some 4,500 years ago. Regardless of where they lived, the flood waters carried them to the Arctic.

This is not the first time dinosaur fossils were found in the Arctic. You can read about previous discoveries here and here.